Author: CCW

“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

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“An attentive ear is the wise man’s desire”

It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year when yellow leaves or few or none do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. His words are suggestive and belong to one of the most important and yet most neglected aspects of our humanity, remembering. November is the grey month of our remembering, a remembering of our end in God in the Communion of Saints; in short, our vocation as the children of God. Yet this includes our remembering too of the harsh and hard realities of sin and evil, of war and destruction signalled by Remembrance Day last Monday. It is really a kind of secular All Souls’ day.

“Bare ruin’d choirs”. It could be a metaphor for what T.S. Eliot called the Waste Land, the waste land of modernity following upon the carnage of the First World and its legacy of death and destruction that continues to haunt us. Shakespeare may be alluding to the literal ruins of the choirs of the English monasteries through their dissolution by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, the confiscation of church properties by the State. But he is also reflecting on the passage of time, of aging, of the personal realities of dying and death. Momento mori, a remembering of our common mortality is an important feature of what belongs to our humanity. It is not simply morbid and negative but reflective in the sense that it opens us out to something more and something greater. At least that is the kind of holy remembering that is set before us in this time of endings and beginnings. They recall us to what is eternal and abiding even in the face of the sins and evils of ourselves and our world. A remembering which is ultimately restorative and healing.

“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in The Tempest that seeks to convict the consciences of “ye three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian. They are meant to remember how they sought the harm of Prospero and Miranda, having usurped Prospero’s dukedom of Milan. Yet, as Ariel indicates, this remembering which is a calling to account is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”. In the judgement there is mercy and truth, grace and hope through the greater power of forgiveness. This is the same point that Luke is making in this morning’s second lesson.

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“Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising /
Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”

The year runs out with the themes of judgment and mercy. There is the sense of apocalypse. The Gospel for today is sometimes called the “Matthaean Apocalypse”. That section of his gospel deals with the sense of the end-time and the theme of judgment. We are also, in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, reading from those books which take their place between the Old Testament and the New Testament sometimes called collectively the Apocrypha. These writings contain various forms of apocalyptic literature. The term “apocrypha” literally means “things hidden away”; the words “apocalyptic” and “apocalypse”, on the other hand, refer to what is revealed or uncovered. They call us to reflection, to a kind of remembering upon which all our thinking depends, namely, the wisdom of God in moral teachings and in the order of creation.

In general, what we confront is the uncovering of all things from the standpoint of God, a consideration of how things stand in the sight of God’s all-knowing, absolute and total judgment. In particular, what we confront is the unveiling of our souls and lives in the light of God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ.

There is nothing soft and sentimental about any of this. Quite the contrary, it may seem terribly harsh and perfectly dreadful. We all cringe at the idea of death and judgment. But that is to miss the point. The judgment is itself the mercy. We are reminded – strongly reminded – that our lives are lived in the sight of God “from whom no secrets are hid”, as we say at every mass. It is, too, the very point which the psalmist makes: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising/Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”. Nothing falls outside of God’s eternal knowing and loving.

We are reminded that who we are is altogether bound up in his Word and Will for us. “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, and so we are”, as St. John puts it in the Epistle for this day. The question is, will we resist and deny, or will we accept and follow? Will we acknowledge the struggle and allow ourselves to be called to account?

The judgment is not something external and arbitrary. It has altogether to do with the truth of our thoughts and actions, the unveiling, as it were, of our true intentions. That, of course, can be most terrifying if we are simply left with the terror of our own knowledge of our own intentions. Our hearts are exposed by God’s truth. We stand convicted of all manner of evil intent, all manner of angry, dark, malicious, lustful, and hurtful thoughts, not to mention deeds and actions.

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